It is known to provide user equipments (UE) such as mobile communication devices that are configured to connect to a mobile communication network in order to transmit and receive data. The user experience of connecting to a mobile communication network depends on various factors such as the configuration of the UE as well as the configuration of the network. Parameters indicating the user experience include network load, cell load and downlink throughput.
Although congestion control is taken in upper layers such as transport layer, a UE, not aware of the cell load, may connect to a cell and initiate transmission regardless of its load. This means that the initiated session may receive poor performance due to the offered low downlink throughput from the base station to the UE, for example starting a video conference even though the available downlink throughput is far less than satisfactory.
When a UE wants to initiate data transmission in a mobile communication network, either by actively starting a new service session, such as downloading a webpage or a file, or by a background process such as automatic software update, then information about the cell load would be beneficial before initiating transmission so as to improve performance.
It is known to provide methods for estimating end-to-end throughput as described in WO2012118414. Such a method involves the UE initiating a service session with a server and wait until the session reaches its maximum throughput. Alternatively, a UE that is switching from a first server to a second server, may base the throughput of the new communication channel with the second server on the throughput previously established when it was communicating with the first server. Therefore, these known methods estimate end-to-end throughput and do so only after a UE has already initiated a service session.
It is also known from WO2010066855 to provide a method for the UE to estimate throughput of a communication channel. In this method, the UE actively probes the network. It does so by putting data packets in a queue so that it always has something to send. The other end host, for example a server, is also configured to continuously send data packets to the UE.
The UE and the server estimate throughput based on packet size, transmission time, receive time etc. A disadvantage with this method is that the UE always has to transmit at maximum speed in order to obtain an estimation of throughput which wastes network resources. Furthermore, because the method requires that both the UE and the server send packets, additional strain is put on the network compared to if only one end host would be used for analyzing throughput.